NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8399964" data-attributes="member: 42582">[USER=13892]@jdrakeh[/USER]I'd suggest the following:* Either PHB 1 or PHB 2 - probably the first if you want the most "classic" classes and races. * The DMG and DMG 2 and Rules Compendium (the last is an Essentials book) - the RC will give you all the rules for action resolution and the final and best set of DCs-by-level; DMG 2 is good for skill challenges in conjunction with RC; DMG is also good for skill challenges and also for combat encounter design. I don't know what the price tags are on DriveThru but if that's too much, probably drop one of the DMGs (DMG 1 has got the treasure parcel tables, the version of these in the RC is not as good in my view (too random) but not terrible; the treatment of Quests in the DMG is better than in the RC, though to get the fullest (still only about half-a-page) discussion of player-authored Quests you need the PHB 1). * The Monster Vault (an Essentials book) that has most of the classic monsters with MM3-quality stats. It's a bit thin on Epic tier creatures but if that turns into a problem for you you've been playing enough that you can get a bit more stuff!I know it's a bit weird to be recommending more "how to do it" books (DMG, DMG2, RC) than books-full-of-stuff (PHB, MM/MV) - but to get the best out of 4e (in my view) you need to combine a number of techniques/approaches that are scattered across multiple sources and are a bit of a departure from classic D&D. The more you're familiar with "indie"-ish games (especially scene-framed ones like HeroWars/Quest or Burning Wheel or Cortex+) then I think the easier you'll find it to do well with 4e, in which case mabye drop the DMG 2 but post to get its advice on how to treat powers, surges etc as a uniform currency for skill challenge resolution.</blockquote>

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